|
Hello Friends,
I realized that I have been writing to you all every month and have yet to really talk about the great programming our staff designs for the young people in our community. So, I would like to tell you a little bit about our makerspace, which is called the DREAMlab.
Last fall, we made a short video about our programs. (You can see it here HERE if you are interested.) During that process, we were interviewing a young lady in 4th grade, and when describing the DREAMlab, she said, "it is actually a place where your imagination can come to life." When she said that, I almost cheered out loud. It was an amazing feeling to have a child implicitly understand the type of learning environment that we are working so hard to create.
For the past 20 years, leaders at fortune 500 companies have reported that the single most important leadership competency for 21st-century success is creativity. As education leader Sir Ken Robinson wrote: Business leaders want (but can't find) thoughtful, creative, confident people who are literate, numerate, who can analyze information and ideas; who can generate and implement ideas of their own; who can communicate clearly and work well with other people. These needs have not fallen on deaf ears, as makerspaces and labs have popped up across suburban school districts and proliferated in museums and science centers. But these innovations have once again ignored students who are in poverty, as well as black and brown students.
We here at TPP believe that every young person should have access to top-quality learning experiences and the life benefits derived from them. We have worked hard over the last ten years to create a learning environment focusing on building the skills that will propel students to succeed in the 21st-century job market. Every day, our young people learn to solve problems, think creatively, iterate ideas, collaborate, and persevere through setbacks. The DREAMlab is a key part of this environment. It is a space where students learn through doing, combining a variety of skills and subjects such as sewing, design, knitting, circuitry, visual arts, web design, photography, coding, and video production. Most importantly: the DREAMlab is available to every child in the community.
The majority of the innovative learning spaces in our area are only available to families with large amounts of disposable income, and even those families that can afford museum or science center memberships most likely go only a few times each month. The DREAMlab is available to TPP students daily during the after-school and summer programs. An individual student that attends TPP after-school and summer programming for all of elementary school (which many students do) can spend over 1,000 hours in the DREAMlab. That 6-year experience (which includes much more than just the DREAMlab) will cost parents a total of $1,600.For less than what it costs to go to 28 days of summer maker camp at our local science center, students can be at TPP for six years (that’s over 5,000 hours of programming).
I am just so proud of what the talented and dedicated folks that I work with are doing every day. They really are innovating the ways that after-school and summer programs can meet the needs of young people. When you consider things like the staggering 2019 report that showed that black students are five times less likely to be selected for gifted education than their white peers and couple that with studies that show that gifted children that are not challenged are likely to be "mental dropouts" by the time that they are ten years old, you get a bleak picture of why so many of the brightest children of color are being failed by our schools. I am filled with pride to be able to be a part of fighting against this injustice and providing every child under our care with a challenging and stimulating place to learn.
| 
